November 2016

This blog post is a follow up to this post on why we developed the MARA framework. This will be a series of blog posts on how mobile app pentesters can take full advantage of MARA. It does have a lot that it offers and the data can be quite overwhelming to consume, decipher, peruse and filter out the key points of interest.

MARA was developed with the express intention to extract as much information as possible and provide various representations of the same data from mobile applications, so that pentesters can work with the version they are comfortable with i.e. java, smali or dalvik bytecode.

I have been getting lots of questions on how to setup MARA with various follow ups on why its breaking while installing. It is my hope that this short blog post will assist anyone who has had challenges on installing and setting it up.

As seen above, the setup is fairly straight forward provided that the setup script is used to automatically download all the required dependencies. A majority of the issues will generally arise due to either lack of critical dependencies or a partial installation of the same.

The follow up blog post, will focus on using MARA to analyze android applications and various file types that it supports. It will also provide an overview of the data collected from the static analysis and the SSL scans.